Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Dell PowerMax and VMware vSphere Configuration Guide > Cloning at disaster protection site with vSphere
Many Dell customers employ a disaster recovery site for their VMware environments. If this hardware is idle, many customers want to take advantage of it, using it as perhaps a test or development environment. They do not, however, want to compromise their acceptable data loss, or Recovery Point Objective (RPO). TimeFinder software can be used together with SRDF to create point-in-time copies of the production data on the disaster recovery site. This task is accomplished with no downtime or risk to the production data.
This section explains how to use TimeFinder copies of the remotely replicated production volumes and present them to a VMware environment without impacting the RPO of the production environment.
Note: The procedures in this section do not address solutions that leverage VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM). For information about using Dell PowerMax with SRM, consult the white paper Implementing Dell EMC SRDF SRA with VMware SRM.
Creating copies of volumes with TimeFinder software is covered in Copying virtual machines with TimeFinder, and is not repeated here. In particular, as this section is concerned with production environments, Using TimeFinder/SnapVX with hot virtual machines should be consulted. That section details the use of Dell Consistency technology. That technology ensures that the point-in-time copy of the volumes is in a dependent-write consistent data state and the virtual machine in the datastore are restartable.
The assumption is made that the system administrator has mapped and masked all devices to one or more ESXi hosts that are involved in this process. The ESXi host sees the R2 remote devices and any SnapVX targets. For more information about this procedure, see Adding and removing Dell PowerMax devices to VMware ESXi hosts.